Adrian Brown Leader - Andrew Laing Sine Nomine Singers
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101st Season 2019-2020 Conductor - Adrian Brown Leader - Andrew Laing Sine Nomine Singers Saturday 14th March 2020 Langley Park Centre for the Performing Arts £2.00 www.bromleysymphony.org Box office 020 3627 2974 Registered Charity no 1112117 Programme Maunders - Bacchanal Tippett - Concerto for Double String Orchestra Tippett - Five Spirituals, The Weeping Babe performed by Sine Nomine Singers Interval - 20 Minutes Refreshments are available in the dining hall Prokofiev - Symphony No 5 Unauthorised audio or video recording is not permitted Our next concert is on Saturday 16th May at Langley Park Centre for the Performing Arts Wagner Flying Dutchman Overture Strauss Macbeth Patterson Orchestra on Parade! Mendelssohn Symphony No 3 Adrian Brown - Music Director Adrian Brown comes from a distinguished line of pupils of Sir Adrian Boult. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Music in London, he studied intensively for some years with Sir Adrian, who said: “He has always impressed me as a musician of exceptional attainments who has all the right gifts and ideas to make him a first class conductor”. Adrian remains the only British conductor to have reached the finals of the Karajan Conductors’ Competition and the Berlin Philharmonic was the first professional orchestra he conducted. In 1992 Adrian Brown was engaged to conduct one of the great orchestras of the world, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1998 he was invited by Sir Roger Norrington to work with the Camerata Salzburg, one of Europe’s foremost chamber orchestras. Adrian has also conducted many leading British orchestras including the City of Birmingham Symphony, the BBC Symphony, the BBC Scottish Symphony and the London Sinfonietta. His concerts with the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra in 2011 were met with critical acclaim; he was appointed their joint principal conductor. Adrian conducted the Stoneleigh Youth Orchestra for 40 years and, on his retirement in 2013, was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award by Music Teacher and Classic FM. Adrian was one of a hundred musicians presented with a prestigious Classic FM Award at their Tenth Birthday Honours Celebration in June 2002. In the summer of 2013 he was awarded the Making Music NFMS Lady Hilary Groves Prize for services to Community Music, a much appreciated and admired honour. In December 2017, he was presented with the Berlioz International Society Medal for services to the great French composer. It was announced in late 2019 that Adrian had been awarded the Elgar Medal by the Elgar Society for “commitment to the promotion of the life and works” of the composer. The 2014-17 seasons featured several concerts with the Royal Orchestral Society, including a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and concerts with the Corinthian Orchestra including Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony. He conducted a centenary performance with the BSO of Holst The Planets, originally premiered by his teacher, Boult, in 1918. In November 2018, Adrian formed his own orchestra, the Elgar Sinfonia of London. Sasha Rozhdestvensky performed the Elgar Violin Concerto with the orchestra in June 2019. Adrian has conducted Bromley Symphony Orchestra since 1980. He directed BSO in its 2018-19 Centenary season. We celebrated this his 40th season with a repeat of the programme from his first concert (when the violin soloist was Ralph Holmes). Florence Anna Maunders Florence Anna Maunders started to compose music when she was a teenager, and her early tape-based pieces from this time reveal an early fascination with the unusual juxtapositions of sounds and collisions of styles which have been a hallmark of her music-making ever since. This is perhaps a reflection of the music which interested and excited her from a very young age – medieval dance music, prog-rock, electronic minimalism, bebop jazz, Eastern folk music, the music of Stravinsky & Messiaen, and the grand orchestral tradition of the European concert hall. Flori started out as James - a chorister, clarinetist and saxophone player, but following an undergraduate degree at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she studied with Anthony Gilbert, Adam Gorb, Simon Holt & Clark Rundell, she’s enjoyed a mixed and international career as a jazz pianist, orchestral percussionist, vocalist, composer and teacher, and continues to be enormously busy. After a long break composition is now taking up more and more of her time. Over the last two years she has met with enormous success & had her music extensively performed across the UK, Europe and the USA, and received a significant number of awards, prizes and commissions. One of her main aims as a composer has always been to write music which excites and moves an audience – not to say that she has embraced populism, but that her music often pulsates and dances, or allows the luxury of melody to dominate. Her music often draws together a number of different stylistic currents to make something totally new and original, for instance her recent (and extensive) cantata Yaldo draws upon Syrian folk music, the music of the Byzantine Church in the middle ages, free jazz, Hebrew cantillation & complex Stravinskian rhythms to create a compulsive and explosive sound world. With a background in electronic music production, it’s not surprising to hear the influence of dance culture in her compositions often to the fore – as an example take the piece Badder Gyrations, an “urban orchestral riot” which grows into a growling dubsteb-flavoured groove, before fragmenting into a kaleidoscopic melee of broken and recycled funk and soul fragments, coming together into a pulsating trance beat. Flori has been recently working on a number of exciting projects: a concerto entitled Io for the clarinettist Thomas Carr, commissioned by Newbury Symphony Orchestra, which was performed this summer; Da Pacem Domine – an a capella vocal piece for the Cecilia Consort, and a solo piano piece commissioned by the Piano Teachers Congress of New York, which will be performed this month in Carnegie Hall. Her piece Power Moves VI was recently premiered by Red Note Ensemble as part of Noisy Nights. She also has planned premières of her music this season across the world - in particular Bursting Out (for harpsichord and mixed quintet) which will be performed in Amsterdam in April, and Rhakasa Tuphani (for solo piano) in New York. 2020 will also see the premiere of Looking For More - a concerto for bass oboe and strings commissioned by the wonderful virtuoso Mikey Sluman. She is currently working on two pieces for the flautist Carla Rees alongside other projects, such as a solo percussion piece for Matt Farthing, a trio for ONMC, a piece for the Ligeti Quartet, a new commission for Skipton Camerata and other pieces too numerous to list! She will be resident later in the year at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, as part of the Peter Reynolds programme, where two of her pieces will be performed. There’s a lot more information & links to recordings on her website at www.florencemaunders.com Maunders - Bacchanal This piece was written to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bromley Symphony Orchestra, and as such is an opportunity for the whole orchestra to let their hair down in a dramatic & colourful orchestral display. Every section and every instrument are given chances to shine, with no one relegated to a supporting role in this festive romp based on bouncing, lively dance rhythms. The Bacchanalia were Roman festivals of Bacchus, the god of wine, based on various ecstatic elements of the Greek Dionysia. They seem to have been popular, and well-organised, throughout the central and southern Italian peninsula. They were almost certainly associated with Rome’s native cult of Liber, and probably arrived in Rome itself around 200 BC, but like all mystery religions of the ancient world, very little is known of their rites. Livy, writing some 200 years after the event, offers a scandalised, extremely colourful account of the Bacchanalia. This piece is a simultaneous combination of two ideas – firstly a musical evocation of one of these ancient events, steeped in Eastern mysticism, and orgiastic excess, and secondly a modern, 21st century bacchanal, in which the influence of contemporary electronic dance music styles such as dubstep, house & drum ‘n’ bass can be felt. This is more, however, than just a juxtaposition of two pastiches – the modal, Syrian folk- influenced music of the opening section is gradually transformed into a stamping, ecstatic dance of pure abandonment as the differing musical materials diffuse into one another. Broadly the composition falls into three sections. The opening section is based on the 2+2+3 rhythm heard in some ancient Greek & Syrian music. This builds in waves after an explosive beginning into a furious stamping dance for the whole orchestra. Secondly, emerging from the aftermath of this, comes a lively, syncopated dance, with lyrical, chorale-like interjections, into which the third type of musical material, a heavy, drunken pattern based on triplets gradually insinuates itself more and more boldly, before it eventually takes over the entire musical texture. Finally the music shifts kaleidoscopically, mixing the musical materials into new shapes, colours and combinations, before the frantic, furious final phrase brings the whole Bacchanal to an exhausted climax at the end. Tippett - Concerto for Double String Orchestra In 1943, only two years before the debut of Prokofiev’s Fifth, Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra was premiered. However, its composer was absent, having been detained in Wormwood Scrubs for defying the terms of his exemption from military service as a conscientious objector. It is probably, to this day, his most-performed, best-loved work, a happy combination of Beethovenian structure and Tippettian rhythms and harmonies. Tippett himself described the Concerto as ‘a study in polyphony’. The two, entirely independent, orchestras fan out to either side of the conductor – and most often answer each other, with the overlapping string textures forming a rich canvas for the composer.